Currently circulating on streets around Missouri is a petition intended to place on November's ballot an initiative that would decimate vital state services such as education, public safety and healthcare. This TABOR initiative [1], titled "Constitutional Amendment to Add A New Article XIV [2] - Pertaining to Finance and Spending", is putatively being advanced by an entity that calls itself "Missourians in Charge." Ironically though, a bit of digging reveals that the project has been financed almost in its entirety by a single wealthy New Yorker.
Missourians, as it turns out, aren't "in charge" of this initiative at all. Rather, rich out-of-state ideologues are fronting as a deceptively named committee to use Missouri citizens as guinea pigs for their crackpot "starve government" experiments --an experiment which has already proven to be a disastrous failure in Colorado [3].
Missourians in Charge --the group which is nominally responsible for the submission of the TABOR initiative petition-- recently filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission its campaign finance report for the first quarter of 2006. The filing reports [4] that during the quarter Missourians in Charge raised a total of $295,810.08, of which $295,000.00 came in the form of one contribution from a committee it calls "Fund for Democracy."
Research on the Fund for Democracy reveals little. It has no history of contribution to state campaigns in Missouri or to candidates at the federal level. In fact, the only thing the Ethics filing tells us about the committee is that its address is 73 Spring Street #408, New York, NY 10012. That minor bit of information, however, is quite telling.
Permits issued by the City of New York [5] in July of 2005 indicate that the 73 Spring Street #408 address is the residence of one Howard Rich. Howard Rich's Spring Street abode sits on the eastern edge of New York City's trendy SoHo neighborhood --an urban mecca for fashion industry and art mavens. The same building [6] also houses Laissez Faire Books, a bookstore and kooky repository of libertarian thought. The longtime president of Laissez Faire Books and its "parent organization" [7] --the Center for Independent Thought-- is none other than Andrea Rich, wife of Howard.
Not to be outdone, Howard himself has achieved a fair amount of malignant fame for his involvement as president and primary funder of an outfit called U.S Term Limits [8], which seeks to have elected officials pledge to limit their time in office. His role with that national organization has allowed him to reach down from his perch high atop SoHo and meddle in the affairs of other states [9] in the past, just as he's trying to do now in Missouri.
Howard and Andrea Rich are quite the movers and shakers in the one-off world of fringe Libertarian and anti-government politics. The couple is so plugged in to this sub-culture of tinfoil millinery that their tony SoHo home on Spring Street is the regular site for the annual Thomas Szasz Awards, given each year to nuts like Ward Connerly who reach the pinnacle of paranoid libertarian lunacy. (Photos of the 2003 Szasz awards, including lots of Andrea shots, available here [10])
And sadly, Howard Rich has the financial resources to fund ill-considered political and ballot schemes. He is the owner of a corporation called 470 W 166 LLC, which owns real property including a Harlem building valued at several million dollars. And in 2005, the aptly named Rich was able to toss $100,000 [11] into an anti-spending ballot campaign in New York state --some of which was apparently spent on the construction of an 800-pound styrofoam pig [12] that was towed all over the state.
The bottom line here is that Howard Rich is not like you and me. He's not even a Missourian. Rich is a wealthy New York real estate mogul who lives in a fancy high rise in SoHo. He doesn't have any reason to care about whether our kids get educated, our roads get fixed or our sick get healthy. Yet he thinks that he knows best how we ought to run our state. And he's using his considerable Manhattan real estate fortune to amend our constitution to destroy our schools, hamstring our first responders, and generally ruin our state.
Howard Rich and the other national groups spearheading this effort to asphyxiate Missouri government in irrational spending restrictions think they can get over on us by putting a fraudulent name like "Missourians in Charge" on their effort. Missourians should see this racket for what it is, and refuse to sign the TABOR petition they are pushing.
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Coming up in a subesquent post are instructions for Missourians who have mistakenly signed this petition and want to have their names removed.